Every Woman Avoided the Chair Beside the Feared Duke — Until the Quiet Spinster Sat Down

Chapter 7

By breakfast the next morning, everyone else apparently had.

Rosalind entered the dining room to find three separate conversations stop at once, in the way conversations stop when a woman who has been furniture becomes, overnight, a topic. She selected toast, took the chair beside Marianne, and buttered it with great attention.

“You have become interesting,” Marianne murmured.

“How unfortunate.”

“It will pass.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

Vivienne Prescott entered moments later wearing pale green and the expression of a woman determined to be gracious under intolerable conditions. She greeted Lady Marchwood, inquired after the health of an elderly aunt, arranged her napkin, and then stopped beside Rosalind’s chair as though she had only just noticed who was there.

“I understand his grace invited you to accompany him today.”

“He did.”

“How kind of him.”

“Wasn’t it?” Rosalind continued buttering her toast.

Vivienne’s smile sharpened by a degree. “Edmund has always had unusual curiosities.”

Rosalind’s knife paused.

Marianne looked up from her plate.

“He becomes intensely interested,” Vivienne went on lightly, “in a rare book, an unfashionable painting, an eccentric acquaintance. And then, quite suddenly, he isn’t.” She tilted her head. “You must not mind me. I have known him a great many years.”

“Miss Prescott,” Marianne said, in a voice like a closing door.

“I meant no offense.”

“Of course not,” Rosalind said. “Offense generally requires honesty.”

Vivienne’s cheeks colored. For an instant the gracious mask slipped, and behind it was something raw and small and entirely human — and Rosalind, who had spent her life learning to read faces because no one had ever thought it worth the trouble to hide anything from her, saw it clearly and hated the victory, because it gave her no pleasure at all.

Vivienne walked to the far end of the table and sat down between two gentlemen who were delighted to see her.

“You should not have done that,” Marianne said quietly.

“No.”

“She will make you pay for it.”

“Probably.” Rosalind set down her knife. “I have paid for worse.”

The drive left in the middle of the morning: three carriages and a wagon of provisions, threading the lanes toward the northern edge of the Marchwood estate, where an abbey had been dissolving into the hillside for three hundred years. Edmund had chosen an open phaeton, and the groom handed Rosalind up into the seat beside him, and the wind came off the fields smelling of cut hay and wet stone.

For the first mile, she said almost nothing.

“You are quiet,” he observed.

“You seemed to enjoy that quality yesterday.”

“Not when it feels deliberate.”

Rosalind watched the hedgerows pass. Sheep in a fold, a boy on a gate, a cottage with washing out in the sun that would be rain before evening. “Why did you choose me?”

His hands shifted on the reins. “Because I wanted your company.”

“That answer is suspiciously simple.”

“Would complexity reassure you?”

“Perhaps.”

“Very well.” He guided the pair around a rut. “Miss Prescott dislikes ruins, complains about wind, and spent yesterday describing a London musical I did not attend. You like old buildings. You tolerate weather. And you have yet to describe a single musical.”

Rosalind almost smiled. “An overwhelming declaration.”

“I thought so.”

Behind them, the second carriage followed at a decorous distance. Rosalind had glanced back twice, and both times she had found the same face at the window of the second carriage — not Marianne’s, not Lady Marchwood’s, but Vivienne Prescott’s, watching the phaeton with steady, patient attention, like a card player counting the table.

“Miss Prescott came after all,” she said.

Edmund did not turn around. “So I observe.”

“I thought she disliked ruins.”

“She does. She dislikes being excluded considerably more.” He was quiet a moment. “You are thinking about what she said at breakfast.”

“I am thinking,” Rosalind said, “that being noticed is considerably less peaceful than I expected.”

“And when the novelty passes?”

She turned toward him, because his tone had changed, and found him watching the road with a fixed intensity that had nothing to do with horses.

“Who said you were a novelty?”

“Someone did.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters if you believe it.”

She studied the countryside, and the countryside offered no help. “Society has categories for women. Beautiful. Wealthy. Marriageable. Difficult.”

“And?”

“And eventually there is another category.” Her fingers tightened in her lap. “Harmless. The unmarried woman who is invited because she fills a chair without threatening anyone.”

Edmund’s expression hardened. “Is that what you believe yourself to be?”

“It is what rooms like Lady Marchwood’s have taught me.”

“Then the rooms are poorly educated.”

Rosalind turned toward him, but he said it without charm and without pity, flatly, the way a man corrects an error in arithmetic — and that unsettled her far more than flattery would have. Flattery she could discount. She had no defense prepared against a man simply being correct.

They reached the abbey shortly before noon.

The guests scattered among the broken arches, servants laid out lunch beneath a spreading oak, and Lady Marchwood directed the seating with the intensity of a woman defending a border. Edmund did not consult her. He took two plates, handed one to Rosalind, and walked her away from the company, along a path of fallen stone, toward a cloister wall where ivy had climbed high enough to muffle the sound of the party behind them.

“You never answered me,” she said.

“About what?”

“Why me?”

He stopped beneath a ruined arch, and the wind moved a loose strand of her hair across her cheek, and he looked at it — at the hair, at her cheek, at her — for one second too long to be polite.

“Because when everyone else sees my title,” he said, “you appear to see a man occupying inconvenient furniture.”

She laughed, once.

“And because you saw Marianne when I did not. You notice people who have learned not to expect notice.”

Her smile faded.

“Perhaps,” Rosalind said, “I recognized the condition.”

Their eyes held. He lifted his hand — half an inch, no more — as though he might move the strand of hair from her face, and then seemed to reconsider, and let his arm fall. The restraint left a strange warmth behind, like a fire banked for the night.

Then thunder cracked across the hills, sudden and close, and the sky let go.